Change for Kids

The last tutoring session that I had with my students was three weeks ago. When I went that time, I went over the “sight” words with them as usual. They wanted to go over them quickly so that they could get to storytelling. When I told them, though, that they had to go over the “sight” words every week, they seemed disappointed. Additionally, I told them that we would have to spend more time on the “sight” words every week if they forgot more and more words each week. Therefore, they cooperated more with me afterwards. It seemed to me that they were more eager about the storytelling. After we went over the “sight” words, I had them work on worksheets in which they had to fill in the word blanks in sentences with the proper pronouns. Lastly, I had them read a book to me. Originally, I suggested to them that one of them should read the entire book first and then the other one would read the entire book afterwards. They both refused to do that. So, I had them alternate reading to me with every other page. Overall, I think that it is great that my students seem so excited about storytelling. This shows that they have a strong interest in reading and are eager to improve.

My students and I started off session 5 as we normally would by going over the ‘site’ words and doing some worksheets to practice using some of the troublesome words. I definitely see improvement in that they can recognize the words faster, but I would still really like to work with them on writing sentences. To help improve their writing skills, we all took turns reading “There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Bell,” which they really enjoyed. Taking turns to read also forced all of us to listen to one another, which is exactly what they need to do for their standardized test coming up. When we were done, we all chose our favorite parts of the book and wrote a few sentences on why we liked it so much. Both of my students had really great ideas, but had some trouble putting it on paper. I helped them with some spelling, but other than that they did great. When we were done, we all drew pictures of our favorite parts.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/changeforkids/sets/72157622817711367/show/

I saw a huge improvement this week. My students were able to recognize all the words on the short high frequency word list. Now that they are familiar with that list we can work exclusively with the longer list. My students also completed two worksheets this week. They were so excited to do the worksheets that they made some mistakes, but they were able to correct these mistakes on their own. After we did the worksheets they read a book to me. Usually I read to them, but we decided to do things differently this week. They read to me without much difficulty. I was very impressed with them. At the end of the session I gave them stickers for all their hard work.

For my third session I was assigned to work with my original classroom. This class was definitely a lot more rowdier than the other class I worked with. Most of my time there was just helping the teacher control the kids and have them settle down. One of the kids who I was informed has ADHD, I was assigned to work with writing his name with. He seemed to be capable of doing it however he found it difficult to be able to write in between the lines. So I tried to get him to copy exactly how I wrote his name. He succeeded in being able to trace over my version of his name but when it came to coping it on his own, he went back to writing it as he was used to. He was so stuck on writing the letters as he was used to that he couldn’t adapt to changing his style. I don’t think I accomplished much but I did help him understand when to use capital letters and lowercase ones. Surprisingly, while I was working with him, he never once acted up but as soon as I finished with him he began to dance around the classroom.

I also worked with another student. She had trouble with her alphabet in general. She did not know how to spell her name at all. I tried to do the same thing I did with the other student by letting her trace over my version of my name but that didn’t help much. She completely could not write the letter on her own. The letters that came out did not look remotely close to letters. All I could think to do was to tell her that she was doing a good job and that she should continue to try and practice at home.

During free time, I joined a group of the kids to play an educational game. It was a puzzle of the alphabet. I tried to help them recognize what letters came after each other. It amazed me how they knew the alphabet song by heart but still didn’t know what letters came after each other. So every time they were stuck I told them to slowly sing the song and then they’d find the answer. However, that was not the only problem. Although they may be able to say the letter they weren’t able to recognize what that letter was. Fortunately the puzzle pieces had animals on them so would ask them “what animal does d start with” and they would scream “dog!”. Then i would tell them to find the puzzle piece with dog and the letter d on it. It was a long process but after a while they completed the puzzle successfully.

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving!

I thought session 3 went very well. We began as usual by reviewing the ‘site’ words. My students actually look forward to doing this now because they are in a heated battle to see who can know the most words and read the words the fastest by the end of the year. I think the competition is definitely motivation for them to learn the words because they  seem know a little bit more each time. Even if it’s only 3 or 4 new words, I’m happy to see the improvement.

After going over the ‘site’ words, we did some worksheets that stressed the words ‘like’ and ‘he’. One of my students did the worksheet with ease while the other struggled a bit so I tried to help him out by using the words in different sentences so he could see some of the ways the words are used.

We then moved on to finish up reading “Chato’s Kitchen.” I had the students pick their favorite part of the book so that they could write a short summary and draw a picture of the scene. Their ideas were great but they had a little trouble sculpting them into words. We spent a lot of time perfecting our sentences and spelling., but we had a lot of fun doing it.

For today’s session I took on three students at a time. I thought it would be a problem for all of us but everyone pretty much cooperated. After we all went over the ‘site’ words, I deliberately gave the three of them different worksheets so that they wouldn’t interrupt or distract one another. I also wanted them to do some independent work so that I could make sure they were learning the words instead of sharing answers.

Afterward, we picked books to read out loud. Luckily I had the help of another tutor, Lauren. If she wasn’t there I’m not sure I could have helped all three of them with words they didn’t know or understand at the same time. When my students were finished reading, we talked about the main ideas and what we liked about each book. Then I had them fill out their reading logs and we were done. I was happy with the way this session turned out.